I have been using Punch Robson for legal work for a good number of years, and up til now I have always been happy with the service.
We've used them for conveyancing, and for a few other matters. In the past I've always dealt with someone quite senior in the company, and very experienced.
When we moved house last year, of course, we instructed them again, and asked for the same person who had done our conveyancing previously. Well, it was his name on the paperwork at the start, but he soon delegated the work to a junior member of staff. At first I had no reason to be unhappy about this as she seemed pleasant enough. However, things did not go to plan with our purchase, and the member of staff we were dealing with did not seem to have the experience to deal with it adequately. I say this with the benefit of hindsight as at the time we were so stressed with moving house that we couldn't really think straight anyway.
There were a number of issues over the property we bought. For one thing there turned out to be a restrictive covenant in place. We were told about this less than a week before our scheduled completion date, and when they did tell us about the covenant it arrived by post on a Saturday when there was no-one in their office to talk to. They initially wouldn't let us see the document because they said we wouldn't be able to understand it. When we did eventually get to see it, it wasn't that complicated, actually. We spoke to the building company who owned the covenant and they said we really needed advice from our solicitor on how to proceed. However, the solicitor seemed to just want to push it back to us and really wasn't very helpful at all.
Our own fault, but we were so stressed about the house move, we pushed on anyway, and to this day I don't feel we were given proper advice.
The real clincher, for me, however, was when we were told about a problem with the garage floor. This showed up on the survey. I spoke to the solicitor on the phone, saying that it might be a problem because it had been our intention to extend the property above the garage. On the telephone the solicitor agreed that she remembered me mentioning this previously. However, the very same day, she wrote a letter to me stating that she had no recollection of me mentioning that we wanted to extend over the garage. She was clearly trying to cover her own back, and I felt that this was cheap and unprofessional. Instead of trying to help and advise us on how best to proceed, she was just trying to cover herself.
Entirely our own fault that we were so stressed about moving house that we went ahead anyway, without getting the proper advice that we were paying our solicitor for. However, the way this member of staff handled our case has sickened me and I will never use Punch Robson again. They have lost all our future business because of this. I just wish I'd been able to tell them at the time, but moving house is so stressful, we weren't in the right frame of mind to compose a complaint. You rely on professionals to help you through stressful things like house moves. They should have advised us properly, instead of just covering their own backs. read more
